Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Introduction

Introduction In 1821, James Madison predicted that, with the exhaustion of the country’s reservoir of open land, Americans would face the prospect of rising inequality, including “a dependence of an increasing number on the wealth of a few.” Madison thought the main form of dependency would arise from “the connection between the great Capitalists in Manufactures and Commerce and the members employed by them.” Like other founders, he believed that wage labor promoted servility and dependence and that a balanced distribution of landed property and the independence it provided was necessary for a viable republic. It was hardly conceivable that a republic composed of a permanent wage-worker class could survive. Nonetheless, as the proportion of wage earners in the labor force overtook the self-employed in midcentury, it became impossible to ignore the question of wage labor.1 The three decades from the 1850s through the 1870s—what Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Capital”—witnessed a dramatic capitalist transition in which the country shifted from being a nation predominantly of small producers and slaves to one in which a majority were wage earners (fig. 1). Chapter 1 explores this topic in Chicago. As the proportion of those working for wages grew ever larger, many Americans, particularly in the Northern states, scrambled to reconcile republican theory with wage labor.2 This book examines the further evolution of the wage-labor question during the Civil War and Reconstruction in Chicago, the most dynamic industrial city of the Northern states. In doing so, one of its organizing concepts is what political theorists have called “the public sphere,” the arena of public communication in which a body of citizens develops public opinion . The public sphere consists of all those venues, such as newspapers, pamphlets, and other printed media, along with saloons, clubs, and other meeting places for associational gatherings, where political communication occurred. Though some contemporary thinkers narrow the definition of the public sphere to the body of private persons outside the government, there Jentz_Schneirov_Chicago.indd 1 2/16/12 10:51 AM is considerable warrant in American history for including the legislative branch of government as well.3 To James Madison and his allies, the public sphere was central because they believed that public opinion was sovereign in a genuine republic. Unlike conservatives such as John Adams, who despaired of the people’s virtue and relied instead on the separation of powers and checks and balances in government, Madison believed that a wise and just public opinion was possible and necessary to restrain a would-be tyrannical majority or minority faction from dominating the republic. But how could such a public opinion be achieved in the face of the ephemeral passions and narrow interests so pervasive in the public sphere?4 Until the early decades of the nineteenth century, Americans answered that question by refusing to grant legal privileges to business corporations and other organized interests in civil society unless they served a manifest public purpose. In practice, Americans limited the public sphere to those white males with sufficient property and moral standing to confer independence of judgment and a stake in the outcomes of public policy. Only at the end of the period in question, when wage labor and a civil society independent of the state became widely accepted, was it possible to take seriously the modern Source: Stanley Lebergott, “The Pattern of Employment since 1800,” in American Economic History, ed. Seymour E. Harris (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 292. 1800 1860 1910 1957 Year 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Percentage of the Labor Force Figure 1 United States Labor Force: 1800–1957 Self-Employed Slaves Employees 2 introduction Jentz_Schneirov_Chicago.indd 2 2/16/12 10:51 AM notion that the public sphere consisted of a plurality of competing publics. In the emerging vision, each public, including that of wageworkers, reflected a legitimate interest in civil society and the public sphere.5 The story of how Chicago wageworkers and the labor question achieved legitimacy in the public sphere begins with the formation of the Republican Party. The Republican Party of the 1850s had an ambiguous attitude toward wage labor. On the one hand, Republicans wanted to reserve the western lands for white settlers and maintain their access to landed property and personal independence. Thus, they opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories and supported a homestead law for those with little...